I’ve been ranting a lot about Darktable lately, some of you might still have no clue what it’s all about. Also Darktable already has a lot of features, and like any complicated application some of it does need some explaining.

Screencasting has always been a great medium for users to learn about applications, it’s so much more efficient than documentation. Especially if we take a look at the huge success of Meet The GIMP, which was well earned.

I took a look at doing screencasts a while back, but back then (Karmic) recordmydesktop was semi-broken. On Lucid it seems to work pretty much perfectly, so I did a first attempt at doing a screencast for Darktable. At first this was intended as a testing-only video for me, but in the end turned out well enough to publish it. It’s still far from perfect, I recorded the audio with the amplification set slightly too high on an otherwise not so great microphone, so I had to do some postprocessing to clean it up (oggSplit, Audacity (Noise Removal & Compression), oggJoin).

The end result was a video that lasts for almost 50 minutes and covers pretty much all important aspects of Darktable, so it’s a great way to learn about Darktable if you can bear to listen to me for the duration of the video. For the short run this will most likely stay a one-off project. In the long run I’ll consider doing more shorter video’s detailing certain aspects of Darktable, taking a more structured approach to the content.

You should have seen a video here. That probably means your browser or aggregator probably doesn’t support HTML5 video. Please try to view the video on the original page or upgrade to a recent version of Firefox, Chromium or Opera.

The above video has been recorded at 1280×800, so it’s best viewed fullscreen. If you’re using Firefox to view the video you can just right-click and choose “Full Screen”. Or you can download the screencast here.